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final three tonight - elliot, kat-power, and sam cooke ne Taylor Hicks.

Taylor kind of muddled through up until “Try a Little Tenderness”, which was right in his element. Let’s hope for his finale next week he does “Soul Man”. In Blues Brother getup. Because why not — it’s not only what we all expect, but if done without irony I think it could be pretty awesome.

Katherine seemingly just can’t sing without massive / wild vocal gymnastics and palsies. Maybe this is the way pop singing is supposed to be (I listen to a lot of rock, where lack of vocal skill usually gains the upper hand), and the judges loved her “… Rainbow …” thing. She’s clearly being groomed to lock in for the win. I thought her third dress was hot, and that’s about as far as I’ll go re compliments, because she’ll soon be the AI 5 and frankly she doesn’t need them.

Which brings me to Elliot. He didn’t do anything super-flashy tonight (and never does), but just turned in more of what I value from him - strong, consistent vocal performances.

With that said, unless Elliot has a massive locked-in constituency[1], he needs my vote tonight. As much as I don’t want to see Elliot go home tomorrow, I know the odds are much better than 51% that he will given the competition of Taylor (the Beautiful South is pulling for him, and there’s little denying that he’s entertaining when he’s not over-doing it) and McPhever (Kelly Clarkson + T-2000 offspring).

So, in order to feel like a member of an actual community of people helping EY, I need to vote tonight. Ostensibly to help him win, but mostly so I can’t over-torture myself tomorrow when he gets booted. Too bad this is about as difficult as gaining access to a black vault lockdown.
I’ve attempted to log said vote through all three of Elliot lines for the last 67 minutes solid. Over 220 times, by the count of “outgoing calls” on my blackberry. Busy. Busy. Busy… plus the occasional “nothing leading to dropped call… what did you want to do again?”

I really hope I’m getting airtime charges for all these, so I’m all the more enraged if I wind up never getting through.

This leads to a sort-of-not-really-that-interesting hypothetical question/throught experiment, which is:

> If robo-dialers are calling Elliot’s three lines non-stop for two hours, does the number of votes Elliot receives reach some sort of “maximum possible number of votes over three lines over two hours” number that is a constant, and is that number the same for all three contestants over three lines / two hours?

Farewell, Yamin. You are a true star, and I’ll buy your record from iTMS. Never let down.

rds

[1] I’ve long since given up attempting to predict what players do and do not have hardcore/diehard fans… other than noting that the South seems to produce a lot of idol-winners.